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Some Famous People with Finite Erdös Numbers

The tables below shows upper bounds on the Erdös numbers of some famous scientists and mathematicians, including many Nobel laureates. Further details, including the paths that establish some of these numbers and many other people, can be found in Famous Trail to Paul Erdös by Rodrigo De Castro and Jerrold W. Grossman, available here in preprint form — in LATeX (118K), postscript (419K, 35 pages), and pdf (453K, 35 pages). It appears (somewhat abbreviated) in The Mathematical Intelligencer: vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer 1999), 51–63, and (in Spanish and updated) in the journal of the Colombian Academy of Sciences (Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales, vol. 23, no. 89 (December, 1999), 563–582). Some of the data shown here, in particular the entries for the A. M. Turing Award, is due to Chris Fields.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary mathematician, Andrew Wiles, was too old to receive a Fields Medal (but was given a special tribute at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians). He has an Erdös number of at most 3, via Erdös to ANDREW ODLYZKO to Chris M. Skinner. A recently famous mathematician, Yitang Zhang, who proved the bounded-gaps-between-primes conjecture, has no jointly authored papers listed in Mathematical Reviews.

A prolific biologist, Eugene V. Koonin, at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, has an Erdös number of 2, through Laszlo A. Szekely. This gives many biologists small finite Erdös numbers, as well. (Another link to the biological sciences community is geneticist Eric Lander, who has Erdös number 2, via Dan Kleitman.) Indeed, it is probably possible to connect almost everyone who has published in the biological sciences to Erdös. With a couple of hours work on the Web, Grossman was able to establish an upper bound of 9 for the Erdös number of his brother, a practicing physician, who was a coauthor on a biology paper resulting from a summer internship. As Margaret Wilson at the University of California points out, the same is probably true for the fields of linguistics (via Noam Chomsky) and psychology (via Jean Piaget).

Here is a message from another biologist, Bruce Kristal, who has Erdös number 2 and lots of coauthors, which may provide useful hints for other searchers in this area: “I recently published with D Frank Hsu (Erdös number 1), and I am writing to briefly point out some potential implications of this that Frank and I found very interesting. Specifically, I am a biologist who works across several areas. Because of this, I have published with, among others, major figures in research on AIDS, aging, neurologic injury and neurodegeneration, and nutritional epidemiology. I believe that one of the neuroscientists I have published with, M. F. Beal, is among the most highly cited in this area. In the last area, nutritional epidemiology, I am on one (position) paper with many of the world leaders, including Walter Willett. Walt has over 1000 publications and was recently named as the most highly cited biomedical researcher in the last decade. Likewise, Frank is a computer scientist with ties in both mathematics and information retrieval as well as some biology citations. I mention these because Frank and I have discussed, among other issues, whether I may serve as a ‘weak link’ of sufficient breadth to impact the overall network structure both within biology and between biology and these other areas of math and computer science. Koonin is clearly more prolific than I am, but our fields may be sufficiently different to complement.” Interested people can contact him directly.

Chris Fields has an interesting paper in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics discussing collaboration in the Human Genome Project, which gives small Erdös numbers to many biologists. For pre-prints of other papers describing co-authorship paths from Nobel laureates to Erdős, see Fields’ Erdős number page. Dr. Fields provided many entries for Nobel laureates listed on this page.

A person on the Erdös2 list, Kenneth Hodges, turned from mathematics to a totally different field. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and has at least two English literature collaborators, whose Erdös numbers are therefore 3.

Felipe Voloch found what seems to be the oldest mathematicican known to have a finite Erdös number, Richard Dedekind (1831-1916). His number is at most 7, via this path: H. Weber – W. Jacobsthal – R. Fuchs – L.Hopf – A. Einstein – E. Straus – P. Erdös. Some of these collaborations might not meet the usual standard for mathematical research, however (education-oriented works or handbooks). On the other hand, there is a clear path of length 4 to David Hilbert (1862-1943), via R. Courant – K. Friedrichs – H. N. Shapiro – P. Erdös; and a path of length 3 to Georg Frobenius (1849-1917), via I. Schur – G. Szegö – P. Erdös.

We would like to acknowledge and thank the dozens of other people, too numerous to mention by name, who have written in with suggestions, additions, and corrections to these lists. We would appreciate further help from anybody with relevant information.

It would have been nice to find an Erdös number for the great twentieth century mathematician, philosopher, and activist Bertrand Russell. However, he collaborated very little, as did his coauthor Alfred North Whitehead. Thus we can’t find a path using research articles. However, Sachi Sri Kantha points out the following, which also would give small Erdös numbers to several other prominent scientists: "Both Russell and Albert Einstein have impeccable credentials as mathematicians; equally impeccable are their credentials as anti-establishment peace activists against militarism and warfare. They authored the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955, which was the last public document authored by Einstein, before his death. Though it is not a mathematical paper. this Russell-Einstein Manifesto is a valid collaboration of two peace activist scientists, given the tenor of McCarthy era. It is also counted as one of Russell’s publication [source: A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell, vol.II, Serial Publications 1890-1990, by K.Blackwell and H.Ruja, Routledge, London, 1994, pp.194-196]. The specific title is TEXTS OF SCIENTISTS’ APPEAL FOR ABOLITION OF WAR, New York Times, 10 July 1955, p.25. This was the original citation, and it had been reproduced umpteen times in other journals, magazines and newspapers. The worth of this Russell-Einstein Manifesto was that according to the citation in the bibliography: ‘The entire Rusell-Einstein manifesto with Russell’s prefatory remarks. The other signatories, besides Einstein, were Max Born, P.W.Bridgman, L.Infeld, F.Joliot-Curie, Linus Pauling, H.J.Muller, C.F.Powell, J.Rotblat and Hideko Yukawa.’ Among these, at the time of its release, all except Einstein’s collaborator Infeld and Rotblat were Nobelists in science. Later in 1995, Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize. Thus other Nobelists like Bridgman (physics 1946), Joliot-Curie (chemistry, 1935), H.J.Muller (medicine, 1946), Powell (physics, 1950), Rotblat (peace, 1995) and Yukawa (physics, 1949), all of whom have not been included in your current list of Erdos Number Nobelists, receive an Erdos Number of 3, courtesy of Einstein. Since Russell was also the only mathematician who received the Nobel literature prize, this Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 is also indicative of his eminent stature as a literateur."

Here is another interesting story, suggesting that Peter Lax should have a non-integer Erdös number. It comes from Istvan Hargittai.

"Abel-laureate Peter Lax is listed with Erdös number 3. I would like to suggest to correct this because Peter Lax, in fact, has a unique Erdös number of one and a half! Peter and I recorded three in-depth conversations during the past few years in Budapest and in New York. A composite version, translated into Hungarian, has appeared in Hungarian in November 2007 in the magazine of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, called Magyar Tudomany. The original English-language version of the composite is awaiting publication in The Mathematical Intelligencer. Among many other topics, we talked about Paul Erdös, and Peter’s Erdös number also came up in the conversation. How did Lax figure out that his Erdös number was 1.5? Lax never wrote a paper with Erdös, but Peter’s first paper was on a conjecture of Erdös. That was in 1944. Even before that, a paper in 1943, by Erdös, which appeared in The Annals of Mathematics (volume 44, pages 643-646), had a footnote, which said, ‘This proof is due to Mr. P. Lax. Oral communication.’ This footnote accounts for Lax’s Erdos number of 1.5. (At this time, Peter was 17 years old.)"

Here is a path to the famous mathematician Laplace, found by Leonid Yanushevich: